Operating Tips

How to send mass email on low speed networks

Instead of sending a 100 byte email message that has 2000 bytes of To: headers, and to send mass email, try this:

Edit a file called 'message_file' or whatever and enter the message you want to send out.  Then type:

bash$ for i in l0ser@example.com kb9drnk@example.com n1ple@example.com n9fat@example.com
> do
> cat message_file | elm -s "Subject Here" $i
> done

This will email the contents of the file 'message_file' to each individual without having the huge To: headers. (which are very annoying)

There is no limit on the number of emails addresses on the for line, just make sure they are separated by a space.

Capturing listen output to a file

It's possile to send output from the listen command to a file and also to the console at the same time.  Use the command:

listen -t -a | tee output_file

This will pipe the listen output to a file called output_file for later reviewing. Refer to the listen man page for options to help make the data dump more readable.

Compression using OpenSSH

Use OpenSSH with the -C -c none command line option to get a compressed ssh link.

You may need a patch for OpenSSH if it doesn't support the -c none option

This will also allow you to get rid of the lengthy login/password time requirements of telnet and ftp.